Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton

Artpace Exhibitions

About Adam Pendleton

Through formally rigorous and visually spare means, Adam Pendleton’s work serves as a conceptual intersection for unlikely past and future alliances. Specific reproducible media such as silkscreen, ceramic sculpture, language-based performances, videos, and the written essay have provided the frame for his engagement with historical narratives and revisionism. Oftentimes these familiar cultural tropes are visual signifiers for the canonical structures he aims to dismantle. Merging forms of Modernism, Minimalism, and Conceptual art of the ’70s with work from the Black Panther movement, queer herstories, and Latin American political dissident literature, he offers a proposal for another trajectory of history and future, one reorganized by subjective order. It is in this charged “what if” territory that new geneologies emerge, such as with the diptych Black Dada(2008) or with a black version of Sol LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes. The work pivots on the friction created by opposing intentions and timelines of those references and forms. In a 2008 interview in The Highlights, he explained, “I want to juxtapose peoples, moments, events, and even forms with historical periods where their influence or presence is often not considered and at times (un)acknowledged.”